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It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Any schoolchild can smell the rat in the adage.

Everybody knows a game is not worth watching unless the players are trying to win -- unless someone is willing to risk the high tackle, smash the serve, steal the base, or throw the knock-out punch.

The winter issue of Granta explores how ideas about winning and competition suffuse modern society. We return to the magazine's tradition of sports writing. Articles include Nico Walker on the rise and fall of American football -- from Jim Thorpe to Deion Sanders; Clare Bucknell on the history of tennis; and Declan Ryan's report from a boxing match between British heavyweights Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois. Fiction includes very short stories from Caryl Churchill and Kathryn Scanlan; two stories set in hospitals by Benjamin Nugent and K Patrick; Mircea C?rt?rescu on an archipelago infested with angels, and Edward Salem on nights out in the West Bank.

Photography from the Israeli bombing of Beirut by Magnum photographer Myriam Boulos, from the Isle of Wight by Tereza ?erve?ová, and of the U.S. military's global adventures by veteran photographer An-My Lê.